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BHUTTO'S FATEFUL MOMENT

At 1:45 A.M. on April 4, 1979, four wardens entered the prison cell of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a waifishly thin man, nearly wasted away by malaria, dysentery, and hunger strikes. Two of them lifted him by the arms and two by the feet, and he was carried out. His back was so low that it sometimes brushed the floor. He had insisted on shaving and bathing earlier that night—and had done so, with some difficulty—and he had changed into fresh clothes. He had always been fastidious about his appearance. But now the tail of his blousy shirt, ensnarled in the cleats of one of the wardens’ boots, became tattered and soiled.

Outside, in the courtyard of the Rawalpindi District Jail, Zulfi Bhutto, the first popularly elected Prime Minister in the history of Pakistan, was deposited on a stretcher, and his wrists were manacled. There was no guard of honor, and no military salute. As he was carried two hundred yards or so to a wooden scaffold, he raised his head slightly, but he said nothing. Otherwise, he didn’t move. The wardens led him up the scaffold, onto a wooden plank, and there a hangman put a hood over Bhutto’s head, completely covering his face, and a rope around his neck

“Ye mujhai?” (“This to me?”) According to a book by the chief of his security detail, Colonel M. Rafiuddin, who stood two feet away, Bhutto said this in a faint voice, and the Colonel believes he also heard him say, “God help me, for I am innocent!”

At four minutes after two, three hours ahead of schedule, and contrary to the prison code, the hangman pulled a lever, releasing the wooden plank, and Bhutto’s body plunged into a well.

The only family members who had been permitted to see Bhutto in the hours before he died were his daughter Benazir, his firstborn and favorite child, who was then in her twenties, and his wife, Nusrat. They had been taken under guard from a deserted police-training camp where they were imprisoned and driven the few miles to the jail. Unlike previous visits, they had not been permitted inside his cell, and Benazir had sat cross-legged on a concrete floor as they received his final instructions through a thick, barred door.

“I pleaded with the jailers, I begged them to open the cell door, so that I could embrace him, and say a proper goodbye,” Benazir told me this summer. “But they refused. When I left him, I couldn’t look back; I knew that I couldn’t control myself. I’m not even sure how I managed to walk down that corridor, past the soldiers and past the guards. All I could think of was my head. ‘Keep it high,’ I told myself. ‘They are all watching.’ “

Some fourteen hours later, Benazir remembers, she awoke suddenly at precisely two o’clock in the morning and sat bolt upright in bed. “No! No!” she screamed. “Papa! Papa!”

Five years ago, in her autobiography, she went on:

I felt so cold, so cold, in spite of the heat, and couldn’t stop shaking. There was nothing my mother and I could say to console each other. Somehow the hours passed. . . . We were ready at dawn to accompany my father’s body to our ancestral graveyard.

I walked into the cracked cement-floored front room that was supposed to serve as our sitting room. It stank of mildew and rot.

“We are ready to leave with the prime minister,” I told the junior jailer standing nervously before me.

“They have already taken him to be buried,” he said.

I felt as if he had struck me. “Without his family?” I asked. . . .

“They have taken him,” he interrupted.

“Taken him where?” The jailer was silent.

“It was very peaceful,” he finally replied “I have brought you what was left.”

This year, on an oppressively hot evening near the end of May, I travelled with Benazir Bhutto and her entourage from Islamabad, the capital, to Rawalpindi, fourteen miles away, for a jalsa, or public meeting—a time-honored relic of the Raj, in which rulers are presented to their subjects atop lofty wooden platforms in sweeping British gardens and public parks.

Pakistan’s ever-turbulent politics were in even greater confusion than usual that night—and so they continued to be for the next six weeks, until the Army intervened and ended a paralyzing power struggle between the Prime Minister and the President, by securing the resignations of both, appointing a caretaker Prime Minister, and calling new elections, for October 6th. During the time I was in Pakistan, each day brought increasingly bizarre events.

The standoff had begun in mid-April, when President Ghulam Ishaq Khan, a septuagenarian bureaucrat, dismissed Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, a multi-millionaire and a former protégé of his, on grounds of corruption, nepotism, and mismanagement; then, thirty-nine days later, to the astonishment of many, and amid much fanfare, Sharif was reinstated by the Supreme Court. The wily old President, undaunted by the court’s decision, was determined not to let Sharif rule. He consequently proceeded, at a dizzying pace, to dismiss two of the country’s four provincial assemblies, including that of the immensely important province of Punjab—Sharif’s power base. The Prime Minister’s infuriated supporters, in a move considered less than prudent even by the rough-and-tumble standards of Pakistani politics, kidnapped the Punjab Assembly’s unfortunate secretary, Chaudry Habibullah, and then spirited away some hundred and fifty of its legislators—to prevent their defection from the Sharif camp—bringing them to Islamabad aboard specially requisitioned planes. They were all now living in my hotel—luxuriously, but under armed guard. The country’s powerful Army generals were not amused. And by the end of May everyone was waiting to see what Benazir Bhutto would do.

Fourteen years had passed since her last meeting with her father, on that morning in 1979, when she had taken up the political mantle that went with her family’s feudal fiefdom, in Sindh. She was just two years out of Oxford, and was not yet twenty-six. Since then, against the odds, she has managed—so far, at least—to survive five years of imprisonment and house arrest and then a succession of political crises, conspiracies, and attempts on her life. In December of 1988, at the age of thirty-five, she became the first woman Prime Minister of a Muslim country, and one of the youngest Prime Ministers in the world. Her election was a vindication against a military establishment that had overthrown and then hanged the father she adored.

Her Prime Ministership was stormy and lasted only twenty months; now she was the opposition leader in the National Assembly, or lower house of parliament. In one sense, she was only a marginal player in the power struggle between the President and the Prime Minister; in another, the votes she could attract and her galvanizing popularity in the streets were of crucial importance to both men. She was playing the kingmaker’s role, and her choices could well determine Pakistan’s future course.

Much to her discredit in the eyes of many—and to the incredulity of a large number of her aides—she had aligned herself with a vastly unpopular President, to unseat a democratically elected Prime Minister; and it was the same President who, less than three years before, had unseated her own government, and largely on the same grounds. Now the President had begun undermining her again, by refusing to give her control of the Sindh Assembly. She was furious at his betrayal.

As one of her aides and I drove from my hotel toward her residence in Islamabad, we travelled along wide, tree-lined avenues nearly empty of cars, past a succession of public buildings whose institutional architecture was bleak—a sprawl of white, gray, brown, and ochre concrete. Islamabad, which was laid out some thirty years ago at the behest of Pakistan’s first military ruler, General Muhammad Ayub Khan, is a mostly featureless place populated mainly by bureaucrats. It had always seemed to me detached, somehow, from the rest of Pakistan.

Then, just in front of us, I saw the King Faisal Mosque, a huge expanse of marble topped with a golden dome. It is one of the largest mosques in Asia, and its size and ostentation dwarf everything else in the town. I had last come here in August of 1988, a few days after the burial, on the mosque’s grounds, of General Zia ul-Haq, who had proclaimed himself President in 1978. He was the man who had overthrown Benazir Bhutto’s father, and tried him on a much disputed conspiracy-to-murder charge, and then ignored the narrow verdict—four to three for conviction—of his own Supreme Court and the pleas for clemency from leaders around the world. Less than a decade later, he died in a mysterious crash of his military transport plane, along with ten other ranking generals and Arnold L. Raphel, the Ambassador of the United States.

Now, driving through an iron gate and into the garden of Benazir Bhutto’s bungalow, I was struck by the realization that she lived in the shadow of Zia ul-Haq’s grave. Her home—a modest two-story stucco building—was drawn up next to others in squat formation along the neatly ordered road, and was distinguished by guards with machine guns, standing at somewhat imperfect attention at the gate; a satellite dish on the roof; and larger-than-life campaign posters of her—and her father—pasted on a ten-foot-high wall surrounding the property.

Inside, there was perpetual motion, as there always is in Benazir’s entourage: guards strapping on their firearms; aides quibbling about an absurdly esoteric detail; fashionably dressed women rushing from room to room, Chanel bags swinging from their shoulders as they shouted into cellular telephones. On this occasion, at least, there was legitimate reason for stress. Benazir’s popular support was said to be at a record low, and some aides had argued that this was no time to be testing that support by holding a public meeting.

Benazir calmly slipped a lipstick and a homemade anti-tear-gas kit—a satchel containing a wet towel, salt, and a lemon—into a black handbag, then donned her chador and swept through her office and out into the driveway, where a silver truck was parked. She quickly jumped into it, and it sped off. We all dashed behind her—some hundred aides and guards and me—and weaved our way, rather recklessly, into a motorcade.

Benazir is a difficult woman to describe, for each time I saw her over several weeks she looked astonishingly different, depending upon whom she was seeing, where she was, and the mood in which she had dressed that day. Her face can change dramatically, transforming her entire look; one of her aides told me, “She’s a chameleon. She can be anything.” Her skin is clear and pale, which prompted her father to call her Pinkie when she was born; the nickname is still used by her closest (but only her closest) friends. She is a tall, elegant, handsome woman, with large, luminous brown eyes, arched eyebrows, and a swanlike neck.

It sometimes seems that she intentionally deëmphasizes her looks, hiding behind owlish glasses, various head coverings, and bulky shawls. Some women criticize her for it; some men sympathize, because the nation she once led, and hopes to begin leading again next week, has an appalling human-rights record on women, and is among the most conservative Islamic societies in the world.

As we sped along the highway, I listened as her aides talked about Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and about Benazir, both charismatic populists. But he was a leftist; she is not. He was a product of the seventies, a pillar of the nonaligned world, who played the Americans off against the Soviets, and favored the Chinese; she is more like General Zia in that she follows an essentially pro-American foreign policy. He was a man of more than average vanity, she reveals little about herself. It is actually quite hard to say who Benazir Bhutto really is.

She is part Radcliffe and Oxford, with an extremely well-stocked mind, full of feminist literature, peace marches, the Oxford Union, and with a very liberated social life. She is also part feudal Sindh, a haughty aristocrat, the daughter and granddaughter of immensely wealthy landlords, whose inheritance gave her the right to rule. And she is also part of an accumulating myth: of a populist father, extraordinary, brilliant, and frightening, who is overthrown by a usurper and killed; of his two sons, who seek revenge, one of whom dies mysteriously, while the other goes underground and disappears for years; and of the slip of a girl who, after a decade of imprisonment and struggle, routs her father’s old enemies to become Prime Minister.

Rawalpindi is an old British military cantonment that has become a rambling town—a chaotic mixture of pungent bazaar, Army headquarters, Victorian bungalows, and public parks. There was palpable excitement in the jeep I was in as the crowds lining our route to the jalsa grew; then, suddenly, they mushroomed.

Endless waves of people—nearly all of them men, mostly young and mostly, to judge from their appearance, lower-middle class—enveloped the motorcade, pushing, shoving, setting off fireworks, and firing Kalashnikovs into the air. The sunroof of the silver truck opened, and Benazir appeared. Her head and chest were covered by layers of gauzy white veils, and she was illuminated by spotlights mounted on the top of the truck. She was an icon—beautiful, imperial, aloof—passing, almost dreamlike, through the dust and the exhaust fumes.

The crowds grew frenzied at the sight of her. They pressed dangerously against her truck and against our jeeps, fighting to touch them and to catch a glimpse of anybody travelling in the magical convoy of Benazir. Car horns tooted, loudspeakers blared, and volley after volley of automatic gunfire pierced the air. I looked out from the jeep as best I could, past the hands, shoulders, and arms pressing against it, and it seemed that we were being showered from every window, in every house and shop, by rose petals and flowers. Thousands of them fell into our vehicles. It took us three hours to travel four miles.

When we finally reached our destination, Liaquat Bagh, a public park, the scene was tumultuous. After being held hostage in her truck for nearly ten minutes by the mob, Benazir was extricated by about fifty security guards. She looked rather irritated as she climbed some wooden steps and strode across a platform, where I had joined the assembled V.I.P.s. Then, almost immediately, she was transformed. Tens of thousands of people filled the park, and others spilled into the surrounding streets and lanes; still others crowded on rooftops, and some hung from nearby trees. She waved and grinned as the crowds roared their approval—cheering, clapping, and stamping their feet. The din became deafening: more automatic weapons were fired into the air, more fireworks filled the sky. A campaign song of her Pakistan People’s Party, or P.P.P., blared from loudspeakers—half disco, half tribal beat:

Listen, all you holy, warriors!Look at Benazir, the nation joins her!Long live Bhutto! Long live Benazir!

“She was right, thank God!” one of her aides confided, with relief. Benazir’s gamble on this public appearance had apparently proved the pundits wrong. Her obvious popularity would harden her resolve to demand new elections, whatever the cost. She had been seeking new elections since 1990, when, after being dismissed as Prime Minister, she went down to a crushing defeat at the polls, which swept Nawaz Sharif to power, and which she charged had been rigged. Her campaign to oust Sharif’s government had taken various forms, including a “long march” last year, which he had ruthlessly suppressed; now she was threatening to stage another, bringing hundreds of thousands of supporters into the streets and laying siege to Islamabad until new elections were called, and, in the process, risking a return to martial law. (It was this threat which, a month and a half later, would be a key factor in forcing a reluctant Army to intervene and schedule the new polls.)

“We came to power not with silver spoons in our mouths but from the jails!” Benazir now shouted to the crowd, with a forceful jab of her hand. “Do you want elections?”

“Yes! Yes!” the onlookers thundered back. “Benazir! Benazir!”

“Everyone should be equal before the law, so why did the same court that had ruled that the dismissal of our government was justified rule differently now? The final verdict should be in the people’s court! Will you join me in our campaign to march on Islamabad?”

“Yes! Yes!” thousands of voices roared.

For thirty minutes, Benazir played the crowd like a maestro—fiery, impassioned, her eyes blazing and her slender hands slicing the air. From time to time, she adjusted a white veil to keep it modestly covering her head.

As I looked down from the platform and out into the crowd, I realized that there were no women, as far as I could tell. Then I spotted them, behind the platform, in an enclosure roofed with dark-green sheeting hung from poles. Most were exceedingly well dressed, each wearing a silk shalwar karmeez, the tunic top and blousy trousers that are Pakistan’s national dress. Their hair was painstakingly coiffed, and none of them had covered their heads. On their fringes, milling about and straining to glimpse Benazir, was a group of perhaps sixty women dressed in black burkas. They had come to the Bagh from the Rawalpindi slums.

“What is the price of meat today?” Benazir demanded of the crowd. “What is the price of flour?”

The women on the fringes craned forward. Their heavy burkas contrasted sharply with Benazir’s embroidered silk shalwar; their gnarled fingers with her soft, manicured ones. You could tell that they wanted to like this populist aristocrat, and that they did.

The political game is in Benazir Bhutto’s blood. And if it is a paradox for the daughter of a patrician family to be preaching mass politics, then she fails to grasp it. It is just one of the anomalies of her life. She is an Eastern fatalist by birth, a Western liberal by conviction, and a people-power revolutionary—who has carefully modelled herself on Evita Perón and Corazon Aquino—through sheer necessity. She is an expensively educated product of the West who has ruled a male-dominated Islamic society of the East. She is a democrat who appeals to feudal loyalties.

Most people who know her describe her with stock phrases: “She’s her father’s daughter,” or “She lost her youth in jail,” or “She’s the bravest person I’ve ever met,” but they are used only after considerable thought. For Benazir is not an easy woman to talk to or to know. She doesn’t like discussing emotions—you have to read between the lines. Invariably, she steers a conversation into politics and foreign affairs, gliding over what appears to be a troubled relationship with her mother, the fact that her marriage, to Asif Ali Zardari, was arranged; and any talk of her enigmatic brother Mir Murtaza, who disappeared in 1979, after his father’s execution, and formed a terrorist organization, Al-Zulfikar, that was dedicated to overthrowing General Zia’s regime. He now lives in Damascus, and is Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s only surviving son.

A shadow crosses Benazir’s face when she is asked about her father’s well-documented acts of repression—the tortures and imprisonments—and the charges of a rigged election in 1977, which was his final bid to retain power. She remembers only one side of him: the genius, without flaws; the populist reformer and spellbinding orator, who restored national pride after a humiliating defeat by the Indian Army in 1971; the man who returned Pakistan to civilian rule. She has firmly shaped her memories, as she has compartmentalized her life, and I had been warned by her friends that her demand for loyalty to her father’s legacy was absolute. She simply would not tolerate any criticism of him.

To reach Bilawal House, Benazir’s Karachi residence, named after her first child and only son, you pass No. 70 Clifton, her father’s spacious villa, where everything began. At the entrance gate is a simple brass marker that reads “Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Bar-at-Law.” When Benazir was growing up in the house, her father served as Foreign Minister from 1963 to 1966; administrator during a period of martial law; and President between December of 1971 and August of 1973. Then he became Prime Minister, a post he held until he was overthrown, in July of 1977, by Zia ul-Haq, his handpicked Chief of the Army Staff, whom he had promoted over several other generals. That promotion was a move that he later described as “the biggest mistake of my life.”

Benazir’s home is undistinguished at first glance. A modern white stucco complex of two buildings—one her residence, the other a headquarters of the P.P.P.—it is enclosed by a high concrete wall, and sits in the midst of a desolate marsh of salt flats and sand, not far from the sea. As I approached the house, I was struck by a physical reminder of the harassment that Benazir has undergone: Bilawal House is surrounded by an abandoned building site approved by General Zia in an attempt to intrude upon her privacy—an acre or so of pylons and concrete slabs, long since deserted but an eyesore nonetheless.

Disorderly lines of men stood outside Benazir’s gate when I arrived, three days before the jalsa at Liaquat Bagh. Some carried petitions; others wanted jobs; still others hoped to be put on the P.P.P.’s election ticket. There was not a woman in sight.

One of Benazir’s aides accompanied me as I walked across a well-manicured lawn toward her residence. We passed a carport, in which bicycles, scooters, and toys were lined up in neat rows. Sitting in a hallway just inside the entrance door, Benazir was waiting for us. “You’re late,” she said, standing up to receive us. Then she gave a dazzling smile. It was a characteristically revealing welcome: a hint of steel embossed with charm.

She wore a fitted violet shalwar kameez, with an embroidered bodice, and sandals. Her dupatta, or long scarf, had slipped slightly off her head, revealing a cascade of auburn-tinted hair. Around her neck was a gold tawiz, or charm, meant to protect her from evil spirits with a verse from the Koran.

This was intended as an introductory meeting—I had not seen her since her 1988 campaign—and I had been told that her advisers were sharply divided over whether she should agree to my request for a series of interviews during the coming weeks. But she had clearly already made up her mind. “Let us begin,” she said abruptly, discouraging all small talk—something she always seems to consider totally irrelevant.

The condition of our first meeting was that no personal questions be asked, and she was exceedingly guarded about herself yet full of opinions on everything from the political crisis in her country to Clinton’s election campaign.

“No, this is not my most serious political crisis,” she said, and “No, I was not born to rule.”

Her quicksilver temperament and fierce intelligence were never more evident than now, as she hectored her way through the interview. She sat perched on the edge of a rattan chair, ever at the ready, sometimes examining her short, pink-polished nails.

One of her former ministers, a distinguished-looking man nearly twice her age, came into the hallway and whispered something to her. She was obviously not pleased by the interruption, or perhaps by the news. She snapped instructions to him in a blend of Sindhi, English, and Urdu. She then stood up with finality, whereupon he went out. I discovered that this is what she always does when she wants someone to leave.

She called for tea and coffee—she herself drank diet 7UP—and eyed me across a large coffee table, whose surface was bare except for a box of Kleenex, her purse, and two books: “Islam and the Economic Challenge,” by M. U. Chopra, and Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah’s colorful essays on Moghul women, “Behind the Veil.” Almost at once, she was interrupted by a telephone call, and I studied my options as quickly as I could. Our political conversation had not gone well, so I decided to disregard the condition. Clearly, I could not understand her politics until I had a measure of her personal life.

She had spent an eighth of it in prison or under house arrest: she was about to turn forty, and had first been arrested at the age of twenty-four, after returning home from Oxford, where she had studied politics, economics, and international affairs. Street protests against her father had begun earlier that year, and, within days of her return, he was arrested, and she set aside her plans to enter the foreign service and devoted herself exclusively to his defense. Within two years, Zulfi Bhutto was dead.

The remaining family members scattered across the globe. Her brothers, Mir Murtaza and Shah Nawaz, went into hiding in Afghanistan. Her sister, Sanam, the only apolitical member of the family, lived in London exile. And Begum Nusrat, the long-suffering family matriarch, who had spent four years in and out of prison or under house arrest, and had been successfully treated for lung cancer, went into exile in France.

When Benazir had concluded her telephone call, I asked her what her starkest memory from those years was.

“What an unusual question,” she replied, and her entire look changed. She became pensive and reflective, and then she said, “The martyrdom of my father, and my own feeling of helplessness. I knew that morning that he was going to be killed, but there was nothing—nothing—I could do. That’s my starkest image, the one that comes back to haunt me, over and over again.”

She paused, and seemed to be studying the room. After a few moments, she went on, “Equally stark was finding my brother Shah Nawaz dead on the floor.” (The youngest of the Bhutto children and Benazir’s favorite brother, Shah Nawaz died, apparently of poisoning, in July of 1985, in his apartment in Cannes, after having spent a number of years on the fringe of the guerrilla world, in Libya, Afghanistan, and Syria, as the “military commander” of Al-Zulfikar.)

“I had never seen a dead body before,” Benazir went on. “He looked as if he were sleeping. But he was so immobile, like a marble statue.” She stopped, and said nothing more about him.

Then she continued, “My life had been so different before my father was overthrown. I had been exceedingly protected by my parents, and had done only fashionable things. Then, suddenly, I was thrust onto a stage, where life became stranger than fiction. My life became so bizarre. In a sense, it was larger than life.

“So much has happened. After I won the election, I was of the naïve view that an electoral victory, would end the hardship, the trials. But this wasn’t true. During the time I was Prime Minister, I lived under the shadow of a strong military, a hostile President, an entire constituency that Zia had built: extreme right-wingers, religious bigots, and politicians bred during that era of military dictatorship. They had one thing in common: they were dead set against allowing me to rule.

“Then, when my government was dismissed, there were the same death threats, the knocks on the door, the torture of my party workers—although it was not on the same magnitude as during my father’s time. I remember when my husband was arrested”—Asif Ali Zardari was detained on politically suspect charges of murder, kidnapping, and extortion, in October of 1990, after her government fell—“it brought back all the images of my father, and his arrest. When my father was arrested, we never changed his room. We kept his bedroom slippers as they were, his reading glasses, his writing pen. Everything was kept as it had been, waiting for him to return. He never did.

“When my husband was arrested, I would look at his glasses, his writing pen, his papers, and wonder if he’d ever come back. It was an enormous joy when he was finally released, this February, so I’m not saying that there have not been moments of great triumph and great happiness: my swearing in as Prime Minister, the first such woman in the Islamic world; the birth of my children; my relationship with my husband. But there have been far more moments when I have found myself embroiled in a life larger than my own, on a much larger canvas. In a sense, my life has not been my own.”

Pakistan is not an easy country for anyone, let alone a woman, to rule. Its current population is a hundred and thirty million, and fourteen thousand people are born each day; more than a thousand of those will die within a year. Angry students cling to a vision of a Marxist utopia, and equally angry mullahs chant prayers from the country’s countless mosques. For this is the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, which was carved out of British India in 1947 (six years before Benazir Bhutto was born) to provide a homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslims. The idea of a Muslim homeland has never fully worked. No leader in the forty-six years of the country’s independence—neither Benazir nor her father nor the Army generals who have ruled for twenty-four of those years—has been able to bind the nation’s disparate people together in the name of Islam, because in Pakistan you must ask, “Whose Islam?”

It is perhaps because of this sometimes antagonistic religious diversity that Pakistan, more than most countries I’ve known—and especially, its dynastic families, like the Bhuttos—has embraced the legacy of the Empire. Consequently, the country’s power structure has changed little since the British left. It is still dominated by the military, the tribal chiefs, and the feudal landed aristocracy, none of whom are by nature democratic, and all of whom find a woman leader unnatural at best. Only the Islamic clerics have joined the triumvirate since independence. And today mullahs seem to be everywhere.

Nonetheless, it is the Army that remains the final arbiter of affairs, and when I returned to Pakistan this summer I found that it was effectively in control of Benazir’s anarchic home province of Sindh. Truckloads of commandos, backed by armored personnel carriers, riot equipment, and jeeps, had fanned out through the province in May of 1992 to restore order across a vast desert plain from which heroin—approximately thirty per cent of the ‘West’s supply—was exported, where dacoits, or bandits, were indigenous, and where murder was commonplace.

It was from the town of Larkana, on this plain, that Benazir’s political inheritance sprang. She was born in June of 1953, into one of Sindh’s wealthiest and most influential feudal families, the oldest of four children of Zulfi Bhutto and his second wife, Nusrat Ispahani, an Iranian beauty and debutante, who was considered by the conservative Bhutto family to be far ahead of her time. (Bhutto’s first wife, a cousin whom he married, in an arranged match, when he was twelve, lives on the family compound.)

Benazir spent much of her childhood on the sprawling estate—it covers at least ten thousand acres—in the midst of the desert, where families live in walled compounds, ringed by rifle sights; where landlords are often brutal and peasants are serfs; where women are in purdah and men enjoy their whiskey and their pheasant shoots.

Her father was one of the first sons of a Sindhi feudal lord to be educated abroad: he was sent to Berkeley and Oxford, and returned home a highly sought-after barrister and a brilliant raconteur. He soon attracted the attention of the military ruler General Muhammad Ayub Khan, and in 1958 the General offered him a ministerial position in his martial-law regime. Bhutto was only thirty, and he never looked back.

He moved his family to Karachi, and there Benazir, Mir Murtaza, Sanam, and Shah Nawaz grew up under the watchful eye of an English governess, who taught them table manners, netball, and cricket, and recited nursery rhymes. Their father, ever indulgent, bought their clothes from Saks Fifth Avenue—the measurements of all the Bhutto siblings were on file there—and, although he pampered them all, more or less, it was clearly Benazir whom he was molding and tutoring to become his political heir. When she was six, he began reading her tales of the exploits of Napoleon, from his library—thousands of first-edition volumes, one of the largest private collections in the world. When she was eight, and was studying under Irish nuns at Karachi’s Convent of Jesus and Mary, he introduced her to Chou En-lai. And when she was ten, and Bhutto was Foreign Minister, he woke her in the middle of the night to sit at his side as he received bulletins on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

In 1969, when she was sixteen, her father insisted, in spite of her own misgivings—and those of the college—that she enter Radcliffe. There, by her own account, she was initially lonely and shy, hated the cold weather, but relished the first anonymity of her life. Nonetheless, one of her classmates told me, during her first semester she cried most of the time. Things were decidedly better by her second term; she had abandoned her silk-lined shalwar kameez in favor of sweatshirts and jeans. She became addicted to peppermint-stick ice cream and rock concerts; memorized lengthy passages of Kate Millett’s “Sexual Politics”; and marched against the war in Vietnam. “I felt very strongly about it,” she told me. “I was an Asian, and Asian blood was being spilled.”

The following year, blood was being spilled even closer to home, and 1971, Benazir’s third year at Radcliffe, proved to be a turning point for her. After nearly a year of anarchy and revolt in East Pakistan, which the Pakistan Army had brutally suppressed and which left more than a million Bengalis dead, the Indian Army moved in, and the third Indo-Pakistani war in twenty-three years began. In December, East Pakistan, backed by a victorious India, became the independent nation of Bangladesh. Benazir Bhutto had become a fiery, defensive Pakistani nationalist.

When professors criticized the Pakistan Army’s genocide, she would lecture the lecturer in a vehement, angry voice. When, that December, her father summoned her to join him at the United Nations—where he was fighting a futile battle to forestall Pakistan’s dismemberment—he tutored her in the importance of deceit, having her interrupt his meetings, in the Pierre hotel, with the Americans or the Soviets or the Chinese, to announce imaginary phone calls from one or another of the delegations not in the room, in order to keep his adversaries guessing about his next moves. “One of the fundamental lessons of diplomacy is to create doubt: Never lay all your cards on the table,” he told her.

“I follow[ed] his instructions but not his lesson. I always lay my cards on the table,” she wrote in her autobiography—the closest she was able to come to criticizing her father in it. Some Western Ambassadors who have dealt with her find her assertion difficult to accept.

During these marathon negotiations, Benazir met George Bush, who was then the United States Ambassador to the United Nations and spent many acrimonious hours in the Pierre suite.

“Ah, you’re at Radcliffe,” he said when they were introduced. “My son is up at Harvard, too. Call me if you ever need anything.” And he handed her his card. Eighteen years later, they met again, this time at the White House, and she requested sixty F-16s.

The Indo-Pakistani treaty ending the war and relinquishing East Pakistan was negotiated in the vice-regal splendor of the palaces of the Raj, in the British summer capital of Simla, which had become the capital of the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. Benazir was part of her father’s ninety-two-member entourage, which was otherwise exclusively male, and she continued to absorb the fine art of foreign affairs. “Everyone will be looking for signs of how the meetings are progressing, so be extra careful,” her father cautioned her. “You must not smile and give the impression you are enjoying yourself while our soldiers are still in Indian prisoner-of-war camps. You must not look grim, either, which people can interpret as a sign of pessimism. . . . Don’t look sad and don’t look happy.”

In Simla, Benazir met Indira Gandhi—who had also been groomed by her famous father as his dynastic heir—and was unnerved but intrigued by her. She describes Indira in her autobiography as a woman of “silk and steel,” with “a cold aloofness” about her. “She kept staring at me,” Benazir writes. “Was she seeing herself in me?. . . She was so small and frail. Where did her famed ruthlessness come from?” She points out that Indira’s father was dead, and asks, “Was she lonely?”

As Benazir’s Radcliffe graduation neared, she pleaded with her father to allow her to stay in the United States to do her master’s degree, but he was adamant that she go to Oxford instead. He had already enrolled her there, at birth.

The years there proved to be the happiest of her life. Classmates have described her, variously, as resembling a maharani, beautiful, monarchical, and very rich, and as a jet-setting princess, given to driving a yellow sports car—which was littered with parking tickets—at considerable speed, and being squired around by handsome young men in velvet jackets, who competed for her attentions at Lady Margaret Hall.

It was at the Oxford Union that she gained her formidable debating skills, under the tutelage of invited guests who ranged from Germaine Greer and Arthur Scargill to Harold Macmillan and Edward Heath. She became the Union’s president, the first in many years to paint the president’s office (powder blue) and change its decor: an antique Bukhara carpet—a gift from her father—covered the floor, and a print of ancient Rome, which had been in his room at Christ Church in 1950, hung on the wall.

While Benazir was at Oxford, she was invited to tea by Margaret Thatcher, who was then the Opposition leader in the House of Commons, and was returning her father’s hospitality. Despite their age difference, the two women had much in common, and became fast friends. They were brought even closer together when they were both Prime Ministers, and they consulted frequently on their scrambler telephones, sometimes planning common strategy, sometimes charting the political downfall of a common foe.

I asked Benazir one morning, as we sipped coffee in her Karachi sitting room, what the basis of her friendship with Lady Thatcher was.

“Oh, I’m very fond of her,” she said, perking up immediately. “Of course, she did many things that I can’t defend: her cuts in health and education, for example. But privatization, in the Thatcher sense, was innovative. I admire it enormously. And she has political conviction; she’s not an opportunist, and she doesn’t test the wind. She goes where she wants to go. I admire her single-mindedness. It’s far better to have firm convictions than to study the Gallup Polls. And she’s got tremendous courage. I remember the Falklands War. There were many who felt she was foolhardy. The Falklands were far away, small, unknown. But she fought for them, as some women wouldn’t have had the courage to do. And with Bosnia, again, I admired the way she spoke out; that’s leadership. I can’t bear smoke-filled rooms and weaselly politics.”

The two women had met over scones and tea sandwiches at the Dorchester Hotel one afternoon, when the power struggle between the President and the Prime Minister was assuming a threatening form. Benazir briefed Lady Thatcher, and implored her, “What should I do?”

“Side with neither of them,” Lady Thatcher advised. “They will use you and dump you. Let them fight it out and bleed each other.”

And that is exactly what they did.

Benazir underwent profound changes between 1977, when her father was overthrown, and 1986. These were the years of imprisonment, London exile, and house arrest. She and her mother, sometimes together but most often separately, were shunted across the country and detained in some of its most hideous jails. There were also further, extended periods of house arrest, at No. 70 Clifton or at the Larkana estate, where prison rules still applied.

Her worst period of imprisonment came in 1981, when she was held for five months, from March until August, in solitary confinement in the Sukkur jail—a sprawling brick complex, medieval in design, in the Sindh desert, where temperatures often reached a hundred and twenty degrees.

One late June evening over dinner at a fashionable Karachi restaurant on the Arabian Sea, two of Benazir’s friends and aides, who had been imprisoned in Sukkur at the same time she was, told me about prison life. Like Benazir, they had been charged with no crime and had been offered no promise of release. Along with some fifteen thousand other political prisoners, they were being held “preventively.” Shammin N. D. Khan is a rotund woman of cheerful disposition and hennaed hair, in her late middle years, who is a former member of the National Assembly, and who, along with her husband, joined the P.P.P. at its inception, in 1967. As a consequence, she spent more than six years in Zia ul-Haq’s jails. Muneera Shakir is younger, perhaps forty, with black hair, oval eyes, and a slightly shy smile. She had been pregnant when she was imprisoned, and was denied any medical care. On the day she was released, she gave birth, and within hours the baby died.

“Of course, we never saw Benazir during that time,” Shammin recalled. “She was kept totally isolated, locked in a wing of the prison that had been emptied of all other inmates before she arrived. We were held in a crumbling barracks at the other end of the grounds, or, sometimes, in tiny cells, with no windows—no ventilation—and it was unearthly hot. We were all being held under what is called ‘rigorous imprisonment’: that meant we were being punished, and we had to work.”

Some two hundred women political prisoners in Sukkur, all from the P.P.P., scrubbed the prison’s floors and disinfected their cells; killed mosquitoes, flies, and rats; worked in the kitchen; did the laundry; or stitched and repaired their jailers’ uniforms. Muneera often spent five or six hours a day washing a hundred or so uniforms by hand, beating them against rocks, then ironing them on a cracked concrete floor. Benazir, by contrast, had absolutely nothing to do.

Benazir’s health deteriorated badly during her prison years; the medical facilities in Sukkur were nonexistent. And, according to Amnesty International, lashing and torture were not uncommon in General Zia’s jails, nor was rape. Most of the victims were from the P.P.P.

Once a month, the women were permitted visitors, but only family members. And most of their family members were in prison themselves. From time to time, small groups of women were taken into the prison courtyard and, under guard, were ordered to do gardening; but nothing grew. They would glance across the prison grounds, toward the dun-colored isolation wing just beyond an open sewer, where Benazir was being held. Her cell was separated from the rest of the compound by four sets of padlocked gates, and consisted of four walls of open bars. She was confined, to all intents and purposes, in a giant metal cage. There was no furniture except a rope cot, and no toilet or running water; she bathed, when she could, from plastic buckets, under the watchful eyes of her female guards. There was only one light—a bare ceiling bulb—and it was extinguished every evening at seven o’clock. From time to time, one or another of her guards would leave a bottle of poison in her cell. If General Zia had a purpose in mind in subjecting her to all this, it was apparently to break her and to humiliate the Bhutto family.

Some days later, as I sat with Benazir in her drawing room, munching chips and sipping cranberry juice, the conversation turned to the past, and I asked her about her Sukkur imprisonment.

“Even now, though so many, years have passed, I shudder when I think of it,” she replied. “It was like being buried alive in a grave. You live, yet you don’t live. The days turn into months. You grow older, but there’s no measure—nothing is a landmark. I’ll never forget how hot the desert was. There seemed to be a constant dust storm swirling inside my cell. I was always sticky from sweat, and often coated with grit. My skin cracked open from the dryness, and the sweat felt like acid as it cut into my skin. My entire body changed: I couldn’t eat, yet I always felt bloated—my stomach seemed to expand. I discovered later that I’d become anorexic, and, as though that were not enough, my teeth began to rot, and my hair fell out.”

Her voice was flat, perhaps too controlled, as she talked; only her flashing eyes betrayed the emotion that she must have felt. “Sounds become so important in solitary confinement,” she went on. “Like the sounds of dead bats falling on the roof of my cell. What did I do all that time? It’s strange, when you’re released you can’t remember how you passed the time. I used to ask my father in his death cell how he survived in prison, and he said that he’d pick a day from his life and go through the entire day, minute by minute. And that’s what I did. It forced me to keep my memory intact. I also kept a diary at the beginning; I exercised; and I read the one newspaper that I was permitted each day as slowly as I could, doling it out, word by word.” It was from a paper she saw while she was imprisoned that she learned that her brother Mir Murtaza was alleged to have masterminded the hijacking, in March of 1981, of a Pakistan International Airlines plane, securing the release of fifty-five political prisoners at the cost of one passenger’s life.

I asked Benazir what her most difficult moment in prison had been.

She didn’t answer immediately. Then she said, “The day that a jail official told me”—falsely—“that I was to be tried inside the jail, by a special military tribunal, and sentenced to death. I was stunned—I couldn’t believe that they’d do it, though one side of me said that they would. A few hours later, someone left a bottle of poison inside my cell.”

She fell silent, as if she were considering whether or not to go on. Then she said, “You have tremendous mood swings in prison. Sometimes I would think to myself, My father is dead, my brother is dead, my mother has cancer, and I’m rotting away in this cell. I have suffered and made sacrifices—and for what?”

She looked away, and then turned back toward me, and I asked what had sustained her during those years.

She responded without hesitation. “Anger,” she said.

December 1, 1988, was a beautiful late-autumn day, and that afternoon there was just a slight chill in the air as guests arrived at the jarringly ornate Presidential Palace in Islamabad for Benazir’s swearing in as Prime Minister—only the second, after her father, to be popularly elected in the history of Pakistan. Prior to the elections the previous month, she had never run for office; nor had she ever held a salaried job. On one side of the center aisle in the lavish audience hall were her friends and aides: young, elegantly dressed women in brocade and silk, whose dupattas hung from their shoulders, rather more Paris chic than Islamic pure; young men in double-breasted blazers and houndstooth suits who were full of witticisms, bantering in Oxonian English—the language they always spoke. On the other side of the aisle were the generals, straight-backed and unsmiling, and vaguely Kiplingesque, some with their mustaches waxed into curls, and all carrying swagger sticks. Here and there—sitting together in protective pockets, it seemed—were groups of anonymous bureaucrats, dressed in the traditional kurta shalwar, and groups of mullahs, in large turbans and long, flowing robes. In the front row, Nusrat Bhutto, who, as co-chairman of the Party, had worked exhaustively on the running of the P.P.P.’s campaign, dabbed at her eyes; across the aisle, Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, the chief of the I.S.I., or Inter-Services Intelligence, looked on disapprovingly.

Such a mixture, and such an occasion, would have been unthinkable only a few months before, but, following the crash, in August, of General Zia’s plane, the new Chief of the Army Staff, General Mirza Aslam Beg, had pledged to hold free and fair elections, and had done so.

Just after three o’clock, the lofty gold-mosaic doors leading from a foyer into the audience room were opened, and Benazir, escorted by Presidential guards resplendent in gold turbans and starched white uniforms and carrying golden swords, walked the length of a red carpet, accompanied by the dour, dome-headed President, Ghulam Ishaq Khan. She told me this summer that her first reaction as she glanced around the room at the generals, at the President, and at the mullahs and bureaucrats was “Can I trust them?” All of them, in one way or another, were products of the eleven years that Zia ul-Haq had ruled.

Zia had three passions—the spread of Islam, the war in Afghanistan, and the destruction of the Bhutto legacy and myth—and the actions they moved him to take had powerful effects: he divided the country by his imposition of the harsher aspects of Islamic Law, by his agreement to provide the Afghan-resistance armies with ever-increasing shipments of arms supplied by the C.I.A., and by his ruthless suppression of the P.P.P. He found ready allies within the Army establishment and among the Islamic clerics and the bureaucracy.

As Benazir and President Ishaq Khan continued down the aisle, she glanced at him. He had been her father’s Secretary of Defense and was reliably believed to have warned General Zia that Bhutto was about to remove him, thereby provoking the General, if he had any lingering doubts, to stage his 1977 coup. She passed General Hamid Gul, a key Zia lieutenant and a committed Islamist, who had assumed formidable authority during the Afghan war, as the dispenser of C.I.A. arms; he and his predecessor had also politicized the I.S.I. as it had never been politicized before. More recently, he had used the I.S.I.’s considerable power and funds to cobble together a rightist and religious electoral alliance to oppose the P.P.P.; he and the I.S.I. had also created Benazir’s chief rival, Nawaz Sharif, a leader of the Muslim League. A pale and plump industrialist in his forties, who was from Lahore, Sharif had been plucked from obscurity by Zia to become one of his key protégés. He was now the chief minister of Punjab, and Benazir knew that without the support of Pakistan’s most populous and powerful province she would not be able to rule. Would Sharif permit it, she wondered? Would General Gul?

When she reached the dais, a mufti began chanting prayers, the generals stood at attention, and Benazir, dressed in shimmering emerald-green silk and a white dupatta—the colors of Islam and of Pakistan—took the oath of office, administered by the President.

I had asked Benazir during the last days of her 1988 campaign what it was like to be the first Pakistani woman to run for Prime Minister.

“I’ve never thought of myself as a woman,” she said. “I am, of course, but I’m more a person who was caught up in dictatorship. Circumstances pulled me into political life—my father’s murder, my mother’s illness. I never sought leadership of the People’s Party for myself. But fate has such turns and shifts. When I was a child, there were many attempts on my father’s life. Politics scared me. I remember the hushed voices when we would tiptoe into the drawing room, where the grownups were talking about demonstrations and guns. ‘Don’t speak in front of the children,’ someone would say when they noticed us. This is a life that I never wanted for myself.”

When the swearing in was completed, a rather austere reception began, in a nearby banquet hall, and, over sweetmeats and milky tea, Benazir greeted her guests. For a fleeting moment, she looked slightly bemused, apparently noticing that more of the dignitaries had clustered around General Beg than around her. Groups of them came and went by turns: first, the Army generals, to whom she had already committed herself to effectively cede control of the country’s nuclear-weapons program, of its high-risk policy in the Afghanistan war, and of its support to the anti-Indian insurgency in the disputed border state of Kashmir, over which India and Pakistan had twice gone to war. (Her authority over the military proved so marginal that when she requested the I.S.I. files on her brother Mir Murtaza the agency refused to send them to her.) The generals were followed by the mullahs, who had already begun to shriek with despair at the evils that would befall a nation with a woman at its head. “They’d been saying the most audacious things,” Benazir told me this summer. “They issued fatwas that I must be stopped, and they circulated pamphlets saying that the Holy Prophet was weeping tears of blood: ‘Oh, why, why, a woman elected Prime Minister?’ Some of them even rushed off to Saudi Arabia to seek advice. Clergymen from Yemen to Egypt pulled out their holy books. I must say, my election did trigger a great debate in the Islamic world.” During the campaign, the mullahs, assisted by Sharif and General Gul, had also air-dropped thousands of leaflets featuring doctored photographs of Benazir dancing in a Paris night club, and her mother, in a sequinned Western evening gown, waltzing at the White House with President Gerald Ford. “Anti-Islamic” was scrawled across the leaflets in thick lettering.

Standing slightly aloof in the mirrored, wood-panelled hall, as Benazir continued to receive her guests, was Robert Oakley, the Ambassador of the United States, who had played a not insubstantial role in her swearing in. For thirteen days following the election, in which the P.P.P. had amassed the largest number of electoral votes, President Ishaq Khan had nervously consulted with his generals and bureaucrats, and with Nawaz Sharif, while Benazir, just as nervously, had paced the floor of the drawing room of her dentist’s bungalow, near the Presidential Palace, as she waited to be invited to form a government. On the fourteenth day, Ambassador Oakley called on the President and made it clear that the United States believed that Benazir should be sworn in.

Now the President and the Prime Minister stood together in the banquet hall, scrutinizing each other warily. The President wiped samosa from his lips and muttered a few words of congratulations. Then he abruptly turned to leave. “It’s prayer time,” he said.

“May I join you for prayers in the mosque?” Benazir asked.

“It’s for men only,” the President replied, and he began shuffling off. Then he turned around and added, “But you can watch.”

One senses in talking to Benazir that the role of Prime Minister was not an easy one for her to adopt, and that she was never quite certain how to project herself: Should she be the avenging feudal daughter of Sindh? The urbane internationalist? The demure Muslim mother and wife? Or the impetuous aristocrat who, with arrogant ease, could plunge into the maelstrom of political maneuvering and intrigue?

She had little time to decide which persona fitted her best, for after twenty turbulent months in office she was dismissed. Confronted by a deadly combination of political, military, and religious foes, she did well, according to many Pakistanis, to last as long as she did; it was longer than many had expected she would. For although she cut a glamorous and popular figure abroad, at home she never really seemed to get a grip on either the country or the government. Pakistanis grew weary of her supporters’ chants of “eleven years of tyranny” to explain away the nation’s ills. Disillusionment followed, and Benazir’s inexperience showed. In its nearly two years of existence, her government passed virtually no legislation.

She presided over a sliding economy, a deteriorating security situation, a growing communal threat, a confrontation between democracy and the Army, and dangerous diplomatic drift. She was harassed by an energetic opposition, led from Punjab by Nawaz Sharif, she was destabilized by violence in her home province of Sindh; and she was faced with the growing hostility of both the Army and the Muslim clerics. Above and beyond this, she laid her administration open to the charge of corruption. Among the worst offenders, according to the President and the generals, were her flamboyant, controversial husband and her father-in-law.

There was a familiar ring to the President’s charges against her to justify the dismissal of her government: corruption, nepotism, mismanagement, and loss of the people’s confidence. Three times in the last five years, Pakistani Prime Ministers have been dismissed on those grounds—real or imagined—by the President, or the Army, or both. But Benazir had to live up to higher expectations than the others.

“People were expecting a liberal, Western-educated woman with forward-looking programs,” I was told by Dr. Hamida Khuhro, who is a formidable woman herself—an Oxford-educated friend of the Bhutto family but a political opponent in the feudal Larkana constituency. “When Benazir came to power, she could have set the trend, but the first thing she did was to shroud herself in a chador, the most obstructionist, outward manifestation of Islam, and begin praying incessantly at saints’ tombs, the most superstitious part of Islam. She’s vastly superstitious, and it shows. She could have been a reformer, but she wasn’t; she did nothing for women, which she could have done. And, with her education and her background, she simply has no excuse.” (Benazir later told me, “There are some who would have liked me to solely champion women’s causes. As a political leader, I can’t.”)

A Western Ambassador says, “Benazir’s a dreamer, a great conceptualist. She says all the right things, but she has no follow-through. She wasn’t able to focus, to move things forward, or to control situations. Maybe she’ll pick better people next time. It’s her streak of loyalty that kills her; she always goes back to what people have done in the past—how they served her father, how much time they spent in jail—rather than considering what they could do in the future. She therefore failed to tap an enormous pool of brilliant young intellectuals and technocrats who could have turned this country around. Instead, she relied on the feudal landlords, who catered to her illusion that it was her birthright to rule. She’s one of the most bewildering women I’ve ever met: one moment, she is utter charm; the next moment, she’s so antagonistic that she comes perilously close to impertinence. But she’s not a sulker, she’s a battler and a survivor, and that’s not all bad. Basically, she’s driven: She’s a P.P.P. politician with the name Bhutto, and she never stops. She’ll do anything to get elected, and she simply cannot accept that anyone can do this country any good except her. She’s a wonderful campaigner; she gives wonderful speeches. But the basic question we always come back to is: Can she rule?”

A top Presidential adviser and one of Pakistan’s ranking bureaucrats remarked to me one morning that he was perplexed by Benazir. “I told her from the beginning that she simply must try to get on with the President. Here is a man, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, who has been around forever; in him she could have found a friend, a philosopher, a guide. He was seventy-three, for God’s sake, and she was only thirty-five. But she thought she knew better; I think she was very badly advised. She should have tried to understand him, but she was arrogant and impetuous, and acted, on occasion, slightly like a Moghul empress. But, that being said, in spite of everything—she’s been out in the cold now for quite some time—she remains the only political leader in this country heading a political party with roots nationwide. She is, in every sense of the term, the only national leader we have, and the only one who has genuine support in the West.” He paused for a moment, and then he said, “Her main weakness is her husband. It’s a pity. I wish she had married someone else.”

Asif Ali Zardari is a party-loving sportsman with a colorful past, an extremely charming forty-year-old businessman. He has a handsome, rugged face, set off by jet-black hair and a thick black handlebar mustache. His main preoccupations before he married Benazir were polo by day and discotheques by night. His one concession to her political vulnerability, after their engagement was announced, was to dismantle the disco in his Karachi living room.

Their marriage was an odd alliance, and astonished many of Benazir’s friends—even those already accustomed to unpredictability on her part—not only because she was marrying Zardari but because she had agreed to a marriage that was arranged.

She had been present during most of the negotiations between the two families (which took place in London in July, 1987, over five nerve-racking days), as had he. “I avoided him as much as possible,” Benazir said of the man whom she had met only once before, at a dinner party, but really couldn’t remember very well. She maintains—not altogether convincingly—that it was not an “absolutely” arranged match, since she had been given the power of veto after Asif was chosen by her aunt.

Over the five days, the Bhuttos and the Zardaris came and went from a Bhutto-family flat. But unlike conventional arranged marriages in Pakistan, before which investigations are made into family finances and status, the London talks were dominated by the question of whether Asif could cope with a wife as powerful and politically dominant as Benazir.

On the evening of the fifth day, she decided that he could, she told me one morning, adding, “Fate presented itself in the form of a bee.”

Twelve of us were wedged—somewhat precariously, I thought—in one of Asif’s Pajeros, as he drove us along a precipitous mountain road on our way to an old hill station of the Raj for a family outing. Benazir had invited me along the night before, explaining that it would be quite simple arid casual, and it clearly was: Benazir and Asif, three children—Bilawal, four; Bakhtawar, three; and Asifa, four months—two nannies, three security guards, Benazir’s political assistant and constant companion, Naheed Khan, and me, together with baby carriages, picnic baskets, baby bottles, baskets of cherries, boxes of diapers, and two mobile telephones. In front of us and behind us were two more Pajeros, one Mercedes, and two security cars. “My husband likes to travel in an entourage,” Benazir said.

“What about the bee?” I asked now.

She explained that on the fourth day of the negotiations she had gone, with a niece, to Windsor Park—while Asif had gone to a polo match—and a bee had stung her on one hand. By the evening, when the Zardaris arrived at the flat, Benazir’s hand was swollen and she was in considerable pain. Asif had insisted on taking her to a hospital, and had arranged for a doctor and a car. Her most revealing comment was “For once, I was not the one in charge.”

She nonetheless still shows a notable lack of enthusiasm for arranged marriages generally, and when the subject of her own comes up she discusses it almost as one removed. So one morning over coffee, a few days before, I had asked her mother, Nusrat, why Benazir had agreed to such a marriage. (Despite the fact that Asif had been chosen by Zulfi Bhutto’s sister, his widow—who had been rather desperately urging Benazir to marry for years—had been an ardent supporter of the match.)

An elegant woman with large eyes, a spirited disposition, and an easy smile, Begum Nusrat Bhutto is now in her mid-sixties, yet it is easy to imagine her as the striking, raven-haired beauty that she was when she married Zulfi Bhutto, in Karachi, in 1951. Theirs was not an arranged marriage but, rather, a love match, which was almost unheard of then. And all their children eventually followed their example and married for love—except Benazir.

“Things were very different in the fifties,” Begum Nusrat explained. “Fundamentalism wasn’t strong, and I was always a free bird. Zulfi was also not yet in politics—he was still studying at Oxford—so we could do as we chose. But with Benazir it was a very different situation. She was already in politics, meeting loads of men; she couldn’t afford a scandal. What if she fell in love? What if it was with the wrong man? Her life—her political life—would be ruined. She had resisted even the idea of marriage for years. I remember one day when we quarrelled, and she said, ‘Mummy, if you ask me one more time I won’t marry at all.’ But finally she relented, and agreed to an arranged match.”

Ironically, the marriage, a liaison of convenience that was meant to silence gossip and, perhaps as important, to provide heirs to carry on the Bhutto legacy, has proved to be one of Benazir’s greatest liabilities. Zardari is no Dennis Thatcher. “Her husband is her jugular,” a Western Ambassador told me. “He is generally perceived to be corrupt, and is known as Mr. Ten Per Cent, but she seems to be absolutely infatuated with him, and during her time in office she never bothered to rein him in.” Despite the public perception, Zardari, who was jailed for nearly two and a half years, either on or awaiting trial on politically suspect charges of murder, conspiracy, and extortion, was released last February on bail, after being acquitted in nine cases. He is still fighting a tenth.

As we continued up the mountain road, we passed a number of shrines to saints, and I noticed that Benazir discreetly and slowly moved her head from right to left—a gesture of homage to the dead.

When we reached our destination, a sprawling bungalow with open verandas and sweeping lawns which was the summer residence of the governor of the North-West Frontier Province, Benazir busied herself with preparations for lunch, the nannies busied themselves with the children, and Asif and I sat together on the lawn.

There were recurring reports of growing tension between him and Begum Nusrat—with whom Benazir’s own relationship was becoming increasingly strained—and I had been told by a number of Party members of disputes between the two, over Party matters, over his business dealings, and over his perceived influence on Benazir, so I asked him if it was true that, as his critics charged, he was trying to hijack the P.P.P.

“That’s utter nonsense,” he replied. “Even though I’m a member of the National Assembly”—and at one point he was a minister as well—“I don’t think I’ll ever become a politician, although I must admit I am becoming a formidable player in this political game.”

“What’s the difference?” I asked.

“For a politician, the game is a hundred-per-cent profession, not a part-time job; it consumes you totally. And I’m not ready to make that commitment—at least, not yet. Now I still get my one hour’s riding time each day, spend time with the kids, look after my little business. And if people like Jatoi, Mumtaz, and Pirzada”—all top lieutenants of Zuffi Bhutto—“were not able to hijack the Party after Bhutto’s death, how possibly can I?”

After lunch and naps and walks in the woods, Benazir and I sat in the garden, where her children were collecting ladybugs and picking flowers for her, and I asked her if she worried about their safety, considering the number of threats on her life.

‘Of course I do,” she replied. “When I was Prime Minister, there was an attempt to kidnap my son, Bilawal—to kidnap him, can you believe it, from the Prime Minister’s house!”

She paused and looked down into the valley, beyond the lawn, then turned back toward me. “It’s really not been easy,” she said. “But I lived in fear for my father’s life the entire time I was growing up, and I’m determined that I’m not going to lead that life again, nor am I going to permit my children to have that kind of fear. I’ve adopted a philosophical view, and I don’t dwell on threats. I feel that the time of death is written; in that sense, I’m a fatalist. But now that I have three children I do worry; they’re so small. What would happen to them if something happened to my husband and me? Who would take care of them? But I try not to dwell on it. God saved me before. That’s why I’m religious. Throughout my life, there’s been no one to protect me—except my God.”

One of the more enduring mysteries surrounding the Bhutto family was that of Benazir’s brother Mir Murtaza, who vanished from Pakistan more than a decade ago, intent upon avenging his father’s death. A tall, handsome, and charismatic man, who is now thirty-nine, he had followed Benazir, first to Harvard and then to Oxford, which he left early in his second year, after his father’s arrest. Since that time, he has moved from Afghanistan to Libya and Syria, and has been charged with masterminding not only the P.I.A. hijacking but also a number of bombings and the assassination of a prominent politician who had been riding in a car with the judge who had signed Zulfi Bhutto’s death warrant in 1979. From time to time over the years, Benazir and Mir Murtaza had met—in Paris or Damascus—and many people within the P.P.P. wondered why during her Prime Ministership she had granted amnesty to others but never to him.

“He’s a potential problem for her,” a Western diplomat told me. “This is a male-dominated society, and he’s the son; his return could badly split the Party, if he challenged her as his father’s legitimate political heir.”

And one Party member, who had met Mir Murtaza in Damascus recently, told me that Murtaza was considering doing precisely that. “He’s increasingly concerned about Asif’s growing role within the Party, and about the reports of his financial irregularities. Basically, Murtaza and Asif loathe each other,” the Party member said.

When I asked Asif what his relationship with his brother-in-law was, he remained quiet for a moment, and then replied without answering. “Murtaza’s had a very difficult life,” he said. “He was very young when he left. It was the age of revolution; people were into armed struggle, and how do you fight martial-law tyranny? The man who killed your father? In our culture, which is very tribal and traditional, the fact is that Zia killed his father, and any son would have been expected—would have been forced—to fight back.”

Peshawar is a rugged, lawless sort of place, thirteen miles southeast of the Khyber Pass. The capital of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, it was a major staging area for the war in Afghanistan. It had previously been visited only by drug dealers and spies, but after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, in 1979, it had swollen. Now there are gunrunners, smugglers, freedom fighters, and war victims—and drug dealers and spies. I had come here to meet Major General Nasirullah Babar, who had been Benazir’s chief of staff, in the hope that he could tell me about her relationship with the Army, both during her Prime Ministership and now, and whether he thought the generals would permit her to come to power again. Another key question, as she began her new election campaign, was how she—or whoever comes to power in October—would repair Pakistan’s badly tarnished relations with the United States. Over the years, Benazir has tried to move her party toward the center, but many of her most active supporters are anti-American, anti-Army, anti-business, and anti-rich—opposed, in other words, to the very forces that she is trying to enlist.

As I wandered through Peshawar’s narrow, muddy lanes, dodging huge, brightly painted trucks and eying, and being suspiciously eyed by, men wearing floppy turbans—many of whom carried AK-47s on their shoulders or hips—I realized that in Peshawar, more than in any other place in Pakistan, you could actually see many of the irritants dividing Washington and Islamabad. Peshawar is a statement on the legacy of the Afghanistan war.

It seems to me that, in a way, everything dividing Pakistan and the United States—other than Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons program—has sprung from this: Pakistan’s bitter sense of betrayal after it had served Washington’s interests as a frontline state; the strain on its social and economic structure caused by the influx of thousands of mujahideen and millions of Afghan refugees; a new drug and Kalashnikov culture, bred from the profligate leakage of arms from the C.I.A.’s pipeline; and Washington’s threat—despite a reprieve this summer—to declare Pakistan a terrorist state. Particularly worrisome to the United States is Pakistan’s suspected role in arming and training insurgents in the Indian states of Kashmir and Punjab, but another factor of growing concern—which is shared by the Pakistan Army and by Benazir—is the presence in Peshawar of nearly three thousand “Arab Afghanis,” as they are called, who are veterans of the Afghanistan war. They are all exceedingly well trained and exceedingly well armed, and many of them are followers of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the Egyptian cleric who has been indicted in New York for his alleged role in the World Trade Center bombing and in a related conspiracy to bomb other New York landmarks.

Before calling on General Babar, therefore, I stopped at a rambling stucco bungalow just down the road, which was the local residence of the stridently anti-Western fundamentalist Gulbadin Hekmatyar, the Prime Minister of Afghanistan, with whom the Arabs in Peshawar are closely aligned.

I was greeted warmly, if somewhat warily, by one of Hekmatyar’s deputies, Nawab Salim, who is a roly-poly man with a close-cropped beard and looks somewhat Levantine. He was dressed in a long white robe and a white crocheted prayer cap, and he left his sandals at the door before entering the sitting room. I was somewhat startled to see orange polish on his toes.

After a brief exchange of amenities—Salim had studied agriculture at a university in Virginia and was eager to hear what was happening there—I asked him if, in his view, the Arab Afghanis posed a threat to Pakistan, as many Pakistanis believed.

“None whatsoever,” he replied. “They are all law-abiding citizens, with proper papers”—papers that they had received from the I.S.I. “But they’re being persecuted by the United States: hundreds of them are being picked up; their houses have been raided, their offices have been raided, their hostels and hotels. This place is swarming with C.I.A. agents, F.B.I. agents, intelligence agents from Egypt and Algeria, who have been permitted to interrogate these poor chaps in jail. That’s a flagrant violation of their human rights!” He calmed down after a moment and adjusted his prayer cap, then ensconced himself comfortably in his armchair.

(All those arrested have since been released, and when I asked a Western diplomat if any had been expelled he told me that “somewhat less than twenty” had left Pakistan.)

Benazir faults the United States for having played a major role in the rise in Pakistan of militant Islam. “Look at your great jihad,” she had said, with an exaggerated sweep of her hand, as we chatted the previous morning about the war in Afghanistan. “The U.S. government armed these groups, trained them, gave them organizational skills; huge, huge amounts of money were spent, and both the money and the Islamic zeal spilled over here. Then the Americans retreated to Washington, and look at the mess they left.” It was one of her most biting criticisms of the United States. She went on to say that she was particularly concerned over growing Islamic influence in the North-West Frontier, and that “breaking the stranglehold of the Islamic clerics” would be one of her major election planks.

Now, therefore, I asked Salim if the mujahideen (whether Arab or Afghani) still in Pakistan would support Qazi Hussain Ahmad, who is the erudite leader of Pakistan’s fundamentalist party, the Jama’at-i-Islami, in the elections against Benazir. (Qazi Hussain, who was visiting the Sudan at that time, was considered by Western intelligence sources to be a key Pakistani link—along with the I.S.I.—between the mujahideen and radical Islamic movements in Kashmir, Bosnia, and the Middle East.)

Salim replied matter-of-factly, “If we want, it is our right.”

“What do you think of Benazir?” I asked.

“Her father was a great man. He was the one who brought Gulbadin—when he was a young engineering student—and a number of others to Pakistan in 1973; he armed and trained them in anticipation of 1979. Bhutto foresaw the Communist threat.”

“And Benazir?”

“She’s a woman.”

“Hmm, you’ve been to that house,” General Babar said after greeting me, with a firm handshake and a broad smile, when I arrived at his. He did little to disguise his concern, muttering that the United States bore full responsibility for “setting these chaps loose.” That having been established, he led me through an interior courtyard and into a beautifully appointed room, of dark wood and antique carpets, whose walls were lined with books.

A thoughtful and well-spoken man who still possessed a general’s bearing and stride, though he had retired from the military several years ago, Babar, who is in his mid-sixties, had been a close confidant and aide to Benazir’s father and had served as governor of the North-West Frontier Province during Bhutto’s Prime Ministership. He had then, in turn, served Benazir, not just as her chief of staff but as her primary’ conduit to the military establishment.

I began by asking General Babar how coöperative the generals and the President had been during Benazir’s rule.

“It was a battle from Day One,” he replied. “Let me give you an example. Immediately after she was sworn in, we went to the President’s chambers, and he told her—rather nonchalantly, I thought—that a Russian aircraft had been hijacked and was heading toward Pakistan. She was totally bewildered. She had just been sworn in! She looked toward me, and I said, loud enough for the old man to hear, ‘We’ll block all the airfields,’ and that is precisely what we did. The President was testing her, and he never stopped. Neither did the Chief of the Army Staff. His resistance lasted until the end.”

One of Benazir’s former ministers had told me that her most troublesome problems were posed by the I.S.I., which continued to run domestic surveillance operations, counsel her political opponents, including Nawaz Sharif, and conduct an aggressive policy in Afghanistan, to the increasing annoyance of her government and the United States. I asked General Babar if this was true.

“Absolutely,” he replied. “We had no control over these people. They were like a government unto themselves. The I.S.I., the Army, and the President had been running the show for so long that they simply didn’t want to give it up. They got so carried away with the jihad that, unwittingly or not, they got involved with all these fundamentalist movements across the Islamic world. They thought that once they got Afghanistan they’d go across to the Soviet central-Asian republics and into Kashmir. And I must tell you that until a few weeks ago, when General Abdul Waheed, the new Chief of the Army Staff, cleaned house at I.S.I., these holy warriors were still continuing to do just that.”

After a brief pause, he said, “I must be absolutely frank. She had very limited contact with the Army the entire time we ruled. They, of course, generally briefed us on military matters, but what General Beg did was to limit her exposure to the corps commanders and the general-officer corps. I kept telling her she had to go around more, expose herself, visit the cantonments. But, with all the problems we had—with Nawaz practically declaring Punjab an independent state, with the President sitting forever on the files, with Beg, in keeping with his character, playing a duplicitous, dual role—with all these pinpricks, we were never able to force the point.”

A servant in starched livery and wearing white gloves entered the drawing room with kebabs, coffee, and cakes. As we ate and drank, I asked General Babar if, in his view, the generals would permit Benazir to come to power again.

“It’s a very different Army now,” he replied. “General Abdul Waheed”— who took command in January—“appears to have none of the political ambition of General Beg. He impresses me as a strictly professional soldier, and he’s certainly not an Islamist, as General Beg was. However, I have been led to understand that at the moment, with this political mess between the President and the Prime Minister, most of the corps commanders are fed up with the politicians all around. Yet, that being said, they know that this is 1993, and that a coup would be totally unacceptable to the United States.”

How much Benazir knew about her country’s nuclear-weapons program, which had been launched by her avowedly pro-nuclear father, was a matter of dispute, but I had learned earlier that she had been briefed extensively on it—not by her generals or scientists but by the American Ambassador to Pakistan and the director of the C.I.A.

So I asked General Babar now how well informed she was in the spring of 1990, during her Prime Ministership, when Pakistan moved from being able to fabricate a nuclear weapon to actually fabricating one.

He thought for a moment before he replied, and although he didn’t answer my question directly, he said, “It was presumed that, as Chief Executive, she knew we had crossed the threshold, and that was one of the reasons that our government was sent scuttling by the Americans.”

Benazir had enjoyed enormous popularity in Washington until June of 1989. Then, according to a senior State Department official, attitudes began to change. He explained, “When she stood on the floor of the United States Congress, promising, to thunderous applause, that Pakistan neither possessed nor intended to assemble a nuclear bomb—the very day after she had received a detailed briefing on the weapons program from the director of the C.I.A.—her worth was diminished in the eyes of the United States.”

In October of 1990, two months after Benazir’s government was dismissed and a year and a half after the Soviets completed their withdrawal from Afghanistan, the United States suspended all military and economic assistance to Pakistan when President Bush no longer certified that Islamabad did not possess a nuclear device.

In the last days of June, elections were already on everybody’s mind, and foreign diplomats were predicting that when the polls were held they would essentially be a personality contest—the third in five years—between Benazir and Nawaz: she, a spirited, tempestuous, modern feudalist from Sindh; he, a shy, sometimes awkward, traditional industrialist from Punjab. She is more sophisticated and secularist; he is more conventional and fundamentalist. Her most notable achievements when she ruled were in foreign policy and human rights; his were in economic reform and in dismantling the socialist economy that her father had built.

Other than her People’s Party and his faction of the Muslim League, the only parties in the October 6th national elections—which will be followed on October 9th by provincial polls—of any serious consequence are the fundamentalist Jama’at-i-Islami and the ethnic Mohajir National Movement, or M.Q.M., a Karachi-based party of descendants of Muslim migrants from India, whose members had fought pitched battles over the years with the native Sindhis; the M.Q.M. is considered Benazir’s major electoral challenge in Sindh.

Although the caretaker Prime Minister, Moeen Qureshi, whose Army-backed government will conduct the elections, is not a candidate, his presence looms large over the polls, and both Benazir and Nawaz have been forced to address some of the radical economic and political reforms he has been able to make in only two months. Benazir, who has blasted Nawaz, accusing him of ruining Pakistan’s economy, has invoked Qureshi at nearly all her rallies, citing his charge that when he took over the government Pakistan was nearly bankrupt. Nawaz, meanwhile, initially delighted in Qureshi’s unprecedented, revolutionary agricultural tax on the feudal landlords, who dominate Benazir’s constituency, until his own feudal supporters began grumbling. Attempting to dampen tempers, Qureshi has forbidden candidates to curse each other as traitors or “infidels” or criticize each other on the basis of their sex, and has announced that a hundred and fifty thousand troops will be deployed on Election Day. By September 18th, thirty people had died, and more than three hundred had been wounded, in election-related violence, mainly in Sindh.

One morning, as I sat in Benazir’s office discussing the elections with Begum Nusrat, I asked her if she ever had any contact with her son, Mir Murtaza.

“Of course,” she replied. “I just saw him in Europe a few weeks ago. He’s such a lovely boy—really a man now—but, being abroad all these years, he’s lost so much of his life. He’s so like his father: the way he looks, the way he walks, the way he talks.” Then she said, “I’m now negotiating with the authorities to bring him back.”

I was so startled that I could think of nothing to say, and she went on, “He wants to enter politics here, and people are now negotiating, on my behalf, with the Army and the President, but he must be given an amnesty, and his return must be announced two weeks in advance. I don’t want him to come back in secret, through the back door. He must be received properly by the people of Pakistan. He is, after all, Zulfi Bhutto’s son.”

“But what will this mean for Benazir?” I asked. “Murtaza has been quite critical of a number of things she’s done. Won’t it split the Party if he enters politics?”

“Nonsense,” she said, casually running her fingers through her hair. “There are many families in Pakistan where four or five members are politicians. Benazir will be here, and Murtaza will be here. Murtaza is really interested only in his own province of Sindh, not in being the Prime Minister of Pakistan.”

“But Sindh is the family power base,” I said. “It’s the bedrock of Benazir’s entire support. If she’s challenged for power by her brother there, how can she continue to be her father’s political heir, as he had chosen her to be?”

Begum Nusrat did not respond immediately, and her eyes turned to ice. It was clear that she was angry and bitter. “He didn’t choose Benazir—I did,” she said, and her voice began to rise. “I was to have been my husband’s political heir. But, because I was ill, I told the Party that I would like Benazir to stand in my stead. They couldn’t make her chairman, because I already was, so they coined the phrase ‘co-chairman,’ which we both still are.”

On September 1st, Moeen Qureshi announced that Mir Murtaza could stand as a candidate in the polls, although he would almost certainly face criminal charges on his return to Pakistan. Murtaza responded from Damascus that, if necessary, he would conduct his campaign from jail; Benazir accused him of “holding a gun” to her head by demanding that he be appointed the next chief minister of Sindh. A few days later, Murtaza’s wife, Ghanwa, who is Lebanese-born, arrived in Karachi to file his election papers as an independent candidate, for seats in both the provincial assembly and the National Assembly in twenty-three constituencies in Sindh; in almost all cases, he will stand against the P.P.P.—even in the Karachi slum area of Lyari, where he will challenge Benazir’s husband, Asif. Ghanwa, who was met at the airport by Begum Nusrat, immediately moved into No. 70 Clifton, where Zulfi Bhutto’s widow had set up a campaign headquarters for his son. Ghanwa was accompanied by his three-year-old grandson, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

The morning before I left Pakistan, I went to Benazir’s parliamentary chambers in Islamabad to say goodbye. She ordered tea and coffee, and we chatted for a while about her election plans.

I told her I was still curious about one thing. “You titled your autobiography in its British edition ‘Daughter of the East,’ and in its American edition ‘Daughter of Destiny.’ Which are you?”

“What a difficult question,” she said. “I don’t know.”

She became reflective, tilting her face as she rested her chin on her hand. Then she went on, “I’m partly a child of destiny. Fate put me where I am now, against my own inner wishes, but I chose to stay on, when I could always have opted out. Of course, I did have a sense of duty to my father and the causes he espoused, and now I have a duty to those people who believe in me and to myself. A daughter of the East or a daughter of destiny?” She repeated the titles. “Did I have a choice?” She paused, as if she were considering her next words carefully, and then she said, very deliberately, “I am a daughter of the East. I was born into it; conditioned by it; thrust into a political system which is Eastern—a political system in which I have to win or lose. And, more than that, as a daughter of the East I want other women, born into this tradition, this environment, where they’re forced to submit to those societal pressures and those fates which have been written for them, to see how I fight—as a politician, as a woman, as a mother—and how I survive. I want to show them that they can rise above these pressures too, and that they can demand to make their own choices, and not have others—fathers, husbands, or brothers—make their choices for them.” ♦